Proofreading aims to check and proofread orthographic and grammatical errors, to rectify any typographical mistakes, to determine the use of diacritics and to check elements related to layout. It is the proofreader who should know, among other things, how international publishing rules and editorial criteria are to be applied (depending on the type of customer and on any guidelines previously agreed) and also about the standardization of titles, paragraphs, hyphens and quotation marks as well as about the use of capital letters, the application of orthographic signs, syntactical and punctuation mistakes, etc. To summarize, the proofreader should get rid of all the errors in a text, normalize and standardize it.

Within the publishing world, proofreading follows the copy-editing process. Sometimes a second proofreading is done, in order to verify that all the necessary changes have been incorporated and that there are no errors which need to be removed.